For those of you who may be colliding with Black Hole Deity for the first time today, the band was formed in Alabama by Cam Pinkerton and Chris White, who were co-founders of the cult death metal band Chaos Inception. Cam then recruited Alec Cordero from the death metal bands Cruelty Exalted and Calcemia for lead-guitar duties and finally got none other than Mike Heller of Malignancy, Fear Factory, and Raven to handle the drumwork.
We had our first collision with them back in 2020, when they released their second single, “Railgun Combat” (writing about it here), and then had the pleasure of premiering their debut EP Lair of Xenolich the next year. As we wrote then, that EP (which was released by Everlasting Spew Records) was “an explosive assault that’s a pure adrenaline rush, as well as one that inflicts megaton levels of stunning destructiveness”:
“Listening to the EP, it’s very easy to imagine that you’ve been teleported straight into an alien war zone where advanced technologies are being deployed with both machine-like precision and breathtaking ferocity.”
Lair of Xenolich was such a breathtaking spectacle (and even more enjoyable for sci-fi nerds like us) that it was terrifically good news to learn that Everlasting Spew would at last be bringing us a Black Hole Deity full-length. Its name is Profane Geometry, and today you’ll have a chance to be assaulted by three of its tracks, one of which (“Swarm Attack“) we’re now premiering.
We’ve got some notes from Cam Pinkerton to share about the album as a whole, but we ought to get to “Swarm Attack” without delay.
Lyrically, “Swarm Attack” vividly portrays a horrific battle encompassing an endless cosmic sea between humanity and an “obscene species” who are ferocious “beings of light”. The lyrics end this way:
Horrors approaching from all sides
Grotesque invasion, a macabre display
Symphony of terror, the end of days
Crimson skies ablaze
Weeping with sorrow
Piercing screams echo in the void
Blood soaked soil
Ravenous jaws
Gnashing with hunger
Tearing through cities
Razed to the ground
Swarm attack!
Based on those lyrics and what we’ve written about Black Hole Deity‘s past barrages, you can guess this song is going to be a ripper, and it sure as hell is. “Swarm Attack” is like the furious discharge of a sonic hyperkinetic weapon, technically impressive and ruinous in its impacts.
The song’s cold and brutish opening moments conjure images of a railgun discharge from near planetary orbit, but then the drumming opens up with high-speed blast-furnace intensity, and the riffing begins maniacally… swarming… and darting in electric frenzies.
The commander of these mad and mutilating forces barks the words in vicious growls and vehement roars, but soon after he makes his presence known the song shifts. The drums still fire at breathtaking speed, but the music seems to expand, slowly swirling and becoming darker and more exotic, as if portraying the cold and gleaming vastness of the setting in which this obliterating conflict is happening.
When the conflict resumes, the fretwork heats up to blistering levels, just in time for a spectacularly crazed guitar solo to punch adrenaline levels even higher. And then comes a crushing and cruel breakdown, thuggish and primitive in its pounding, and then eerily throbbing at the end — though there’s no let-up in the speed of Heller‘s drumming.
And now for those album notes from Cam Pinkerton:
“Profane Geometry was conceived during the sessions for the debut EP Lair Of Xenolich. We had a full album of ideas but only a few songs were really fully developed, thus an EP was the result. We spent the next couple years writing, re-writing, polishing, and recording the songs for the full length.
“Musically, we wanted to stay with the same style, of old school death metal mixed with more modern influences. Lots of guitar solos, some melodic sections, some heavy breakdowns.
“Drum and guitar recording took place at Mike Heller’s studio in Los Angeles during fall-winter 22-23. Vocals were recorded at my home studio summer of 23. A long mix session ensued to deliver the final result. There are no keys or synths on the album; all sounds are from stringed instruments.
“Concept-wise, Profane Geometry is about experiences beyond human understanding. Gore and violence is very common in the genre but we chose to take a more sci-fi/supernatural horror approach, with songs about war with aliens, metaphysical experiences, and of course a song about good old fashioned nuclear annihilation.”
Profane Geometry was mixed and mastered by Jakub Maggi Malášek at Neuro Impulse Studios, Brno, Czech Republic. It features hard-to-forget cover art (and logo) by Chris Kiesling (Misanthropic Art). The photos in our article were made by Alex Stowell and Evan Chandler.
Everlasting Spew will release the album on July 5th on CD, cassette tape, and digital formats, and will be bringing us a vinyl edition in the late summer of this year. They recommend it for fans of Nile, Morbid Angel, Hate Eternal, and Mithras. For more info, and to order, check the links below.
As promised, we’re also sharing streams of the first two singles from the album, “Crucible Knight” and “Blast Pit“.
PRE-ORDER:
[BUY PHYSICAL] https://tinyurl.com/579s6c25
[BUY DIGITAL] https://tinyurl.com/22t9my9n
BLACK HOLE DEITY:
https://www.facebook.com/BlackHoleDeity
https://blackholedeity.bandcamp.com/track/lair-of-xenolich-free-download